When I first started playing GTA Online, everything was so shiny and new to me. Lamar, one of Franklin’s friends from the story, greeted me in Los Santos at the airport, showing me briefly the signs of the city and handing me my first gun. From there, I worked my way up, grinding Contact Missions until I got my first heist apartment, valued at around $200k, and my first expensive car, a Pegassi Vacca, valued at $240k before mods, and painted it black (insert Rolling Stones iconic reference here).
At that point, I completed the easiest heist in the game, the Fleeca Bank Heist. I say “easiest” because it only required two people to complete from start to finish, including setup missions and the finale mission. I found that no one wants to do the setup missions, but EVERYONE wants to do the finale.

Why?

Easy money. That’s always the underlying factor.
As a player, it became difficult for me to want to do the heists. Since I didn’t have anyone I knew IRL that played GTA Online on the PlayStation 4, I had to invite randoms to join my heist missions, and that was an issue in and of itself. Sometimes I had to wait 30 minutes before all people accepted the invite, not to mention the players that left my session after waiting 30 seconds, restarting the invite process.

Then there was the issue of low-level noob players joining and dying at a rapid pace during the heist missions, forcing my team to either quick restart or self-implode as one member, having enough of the death, decided to leave the session, making all of us leave the heist and restart the invite process again.

At this point, I decided GTA heists weren’t worth it for the time you put in. I realized the best way to make money at this stage, with around $100k in my bank, was to keep doing the Contact Missions over and over.

Simeon, the shady repossession man who sold stolen cars at exorbitant prices, gave the best missions, specifically the “Blow Up” ones in which you went to a rival dealership and proceeded to blow up their cars. The missions were fun, satisfying, took 5 minutes or less, and paid me between $10k-$20k, usually landing around the $12k mark.

I grinded cash until I could afford a Coquette Classic, a car reminiscent of the classic Corvette Stingray, which was $665k, a car that was almost 3x as much as my first luxury car. I painted it in a color I referred to as “Dr Pepper Red”, and I loved it.
Ultimately, I knew grinding Simeon missions wasn’t going to fully satisfy my urge to make it big in GTA Online. So, I turned towards the next money-making opportunity — SecuroServ CEO-ing.

In order to be a CEO, one has to buy an office. With an office, you could collect crates of illicit goods and go on sell missions to get a huge profit off them. I thought to myself if I just had that, the money would just start flowing in. I grinded missions until I had a little over $1 million, and bought the cheapest office in the game. I went inside and met my Associate, a snarky businesswoman who, for the past two or three years, won’t shut up about having an MBA, and sat down at my desk to view the planning computer.

Unfortunately, I was in for a shock. In order to collect crates, I had to not only invest in them, but I also had to but a warehouse to store them in, and the cheapest warehouse on the market was $250k, labeled as a Convenience Store Lockup in Rancho.

I begrudgingly grinded more money until I could afford the warehouse and bought it. I could buy crates at $2k for 1, $8k for 2, or $18k for 3 at once. As I played the collect and sell missions, I found that the best way to collect the crates with minimal damage and time spent was two at a time. Sometimes they’d be in the same vehicle, but other times I’d have to pick them up and drop them off individually because, as I previously mentioned, I play solo and have no online acquaintances in GTA Online.

I also found out that selling multiple crates at a time could lead to issues in the delivery process. Selling more than 8 crates gives you a warning before you hit the sell button, telling you that it might be split up into multiple delivery vehicles and to hire at least one other associate to help you out. Countless times griefers have blown up my shipments before I got to the sell location, and I lost a great deal of money as a result.

A simple fix to the griefer problem is relocating to different online sessions, preferably with 15 or less players. Go to the pause menu, select the “Online tab”, and select “Find new session”. If you’re lucky enough, you might even get in a session by yourself.